Every contact in your CRM follows a set of stages throughout their journey as your customer. Freshsales allows you to track and assign these stages to your contact to help you better understand the buyer journey.


Let’s understand this better with an example:


Say your sales process involves handling a large number of prospects, a handful of whom eventually qualify as a contact, and proceed to sign up a deal with your organization. In this case, it helps to categorize their association with your business through different lifecycle stages like Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Customer, Repeat buyer, etc.


Here’s how you can configure this in Freshsales:


  1. Go to Admin Settings and click Contact Lifecycle Stage. This opens the page where you can configure your lifecycle stages.


  1. The page contains default lifecycle stages and you can add additional stages.



  1. Define Lifecycle stages and their statuses. 

  1. Lifecycle stage: The lifecycle stage captures the decision journey of a customer. Every buyer goes through starts from discovery to familiarization to purchasing a product and even follow-up orders. This buyer journey can be configured as different lifecycle stages. For example, if you are selling a SaaS product, you can capture stages such as Marketing Qualified Lead, Sales Qualified Lead, Customer, etc.


  1. Status: With statuses, users can track the interest level of a prospect while they are in a lifecycle stage. In the case of our example, every lifecycle stage can have individual statuses. For example, a Sales Qualified Lead usually goes through several stages such as Trial, Demo, Contract negotiations, etc. before the contract is inked and the contact becomes a customer.

  2. Click . This updates the Lifecycle stage of your account. You can also add new lifecycle stages by clicking the ‘Add new lifecycle stage’ button. 


  1. Click the toggle button to enable the lifecycle stage. You can also move the lifecycle stages and their individual statuses by dragging and dropping them.



How to view the Contact Lifecycle Stage on the contact landing page

Head over to the contact landing page and click on “Manage sections.” Here you can enable the option to “Show Lifecycle Stage and Status section.” Click . The contact landing page will now display the Contact Lifecycle Stage.


Updating Lifecycle stage for a contact

Here’s how the lifecycle stage of a contact can be updated:

  • Contact Details Page

  • List view


Contact Details Page 


Find the Lifecycle stage dropdown on the details page and click the same. This brings a dropdown that allows you to update the lifecycle stage and status here and click the ✔ button.


List view

1. On the Contacts list view page, select the contacts by clicking the checkbox beside them.

2. Click the Update field.

3. Choose the Contact Lifecycle Stage field. This brings up the lifecycle stage field and the status which is a dependent field.

4. Update the field and click Save.